Holding the line: Pakistan, Charter preservationism and Third World agency in the Iran–US/Israel conflict

This article advances the concept of ‘Charter preservationism’ to explain Pakistan’s mediation role in the Iran–US/Israel confrontation, a Third World, middle-power strategy of sustaining the authority of international law under conditions of geopolitical strain. It argues that Pakistan’s insistence on orthodox interpretations of jus ad bellum, the prohibition on the use of force, restrictive self-defence, and United Nations (UN)-centred dispute resolution is a deliberate but selective doctrinal conservatism that resists the expansion of permissive norms. Drawing on official statements, conduct at the UN and treaty practice, the article situates Pakistan’s approach within its post-colonial state identity and hybrid normative framework, showing how legalism operates as a rational strategy under structural asymmetry. It further shows that international law endures not through great-power compliance alone but through its continued invocation by peripheral actors. Pakistan’s position thus reflects a distinctly Third World legal consciousness that preserves international law as an indispensable language of constraint in an unequal international system. In doing so, it recasts Third World approaches to international law from a critique of domination towards an account of law as a resource that weaker states defend.